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River of knowledge

The River of AI and Machine Learning

When did machines move from following rules to learning patterns from data?

From Boole to ChatGPT — 170 years toward machines that learn.

1854–20244 city-to-city segments

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What changed between the cities?

  1. 1

    1854–1937

    scholars and schools

    LincolnCork

    Boole — Logic as Arithmetic

    Boole reduced logic to binary-style algebra in The Laws of Thought at Queen’s College Cork. In 1937, Shannon showed at MIT how Boolean algebra could describe switching circuits.

    Boolean algebra in Cork and Shannon’s 1937 MIT master’s thesis
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  2. 2

    1950–1958

    scholars and schools

    ManchesterPrinceton

    Turing — Can Machines Think?

    While at Manchester, Turing proposed an operational test for machine intelligence in his 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” The Dartmouth workshop named artificial intelligence as a field in 1956.

    Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950, Manchester) and the Dartmouth workshop (1956)
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  3. 3

    1958–1986

    scholars and schools

    BuffaloToronto

    Rosenblatt and Backprop — Foundations of Neural Networks

    Frank Rosenblatt presented the Mark I perceptron at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo in 1958. Work by Werbos and then Rumelhart, Hinton, and Williams helped establish backpropagation by 1986.

    The perceptron (1958, CAL Buffalo), backpropagation (1986, UCSD/CMU/Toronto), and universal approximation
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  4. 4

    2012–2024

    scholars and schools

    TorontoMountain View

    Deep Learning Revolution

    AlexNet’s 2012 ImageNet victory in Toronto was followed by the Transformer at Google Brain in 2017 and ChatGPT at OpenAI in 2022—a decade of rapid change.

    AlexNet (2012, Toronto), Transformer (2017, Google Brain), and ChatGPT (2022, OpenAI San Francisco)
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How to read the lines

Each line is an editorial route through problems, texts, and practices. It does not imply one book moving in a straight line, a sole invention, or identical adoption everywhere.